The Mall of Cthulhu

by Seamus Cooper

  She felt extraordinarily tired, as she'd been up at least three times to pee in the night, but her head didn't hurt, her muscles didn't ache, and her stomach felt only slightly sour. She punched the green button on her phone.

  "Harker."

  "Marrs. Ready to get started?"

  "I think I should shower first."

  "By all means. Meet me at the coffee shop catty-corner from the mall in half an hour."

  "Okay." Laura hung up the phone and reflected that she always said "kitty-corner."

  Half an hour later, she was catty-corner, or maybe kitty-corner (Pussy-corner? she asked herself, and then allowed herself two and a half seconds to think that it had been way too long since she'd gotten laid.) from the mall, looking at an enormous latte and Marrs, who sipped from a small tea.

  "Tannins," he said, "You know, even the black teas have fantastic antioxidant—"

  "I'm sure they do, but can we talk about how we're going to get Ted back?"

  Marrs looked down at his tea, and then back up to Laura. "I need to be really clear with you now that you're sober. While we'd love to have Ted and the young woman who disappeared back—"

  "There was a woman?"

  "Yes—mid-twenties, ran a pushcart at the mall—"

  "Too many piercings?"

  "Judging by witness accounts, yes. She fell or was thrown into the rift first, and Ted jumped in after her."

  Laura fell silent. So Ted had done it again. He'd gone after somebody he cared about. She'd chided him for being this brainless puppy that followed people home, but she had to hand it to him—he also had the best qualities of a dog, in that he loved unconditionally and with complete loyalty. If he liked you, there was really no limit to what he would do for you, whether it was beheading Bitsy or jumping into another dimension that would likely kill him or drive him hopelessly insane.

  The self-loathing came bubbling up from her midsection again. Why the hell hadn't she appreciated him more? There probably weren't many people in the whole world who'd be as selfless as Ted when the chips were down. He was a puppy, but she was a heartless, ungrateful bitch who kicked puppies in the teeth. Ugh.

  "In any case, Laura, I need to be very clear here. The goal of our investigation is to shut this Cthulhu operation down, permanently if we can. Getting Ted back would involve either allowing them to open the rift again, or opening it ourselves. Now, Lovecraft has given us some idea of what's on the other side, but we have no idea how reliable his descriptions are, or, even if he's accurate about the Old Ones, what else we might be inviting into our world if we throw a window open like that."

  "So we just let Ted and . . . and this girl—"

  "Jennifer. Apparently she went by Cayenne."

  "Like the pepper?"

  "Right."

  "Of course she did. Anyway, so we leave them to whatever horrible fate they're suffering now—I know, I know you think they're dead, you don't have to give me that look."

  "Listen. Let's assume that the only place we were putting at risk by opening the rift again was Providence. One hundred and seventy-three thousand people live in Providence. We can't put them all at risk to save two people."

  We can when one of them is Ted, Laura thought. She knew Marrs was right, and yet . . . . "Is that the kind of fact you just know off the top of your head? The population of Providence?"

  He gave a small smile. "I looked it up. I anticipated having this argument with you."

  "Okay. So if I have to be satisfied with just taking this operation down, that's what I'll do." In her mind, Laura crossed her fingers behind her back. "So how do we do it?"

  "Well, you have one address—oh, by the way, you've now officially been transferred out of the Boston office, and nobody knows exactly to where, and everyone thinks someone else is responsible—exploiting the natural confusion attendant on any bureaucracy is a specialty of mine."

  "Fantastic."

  "At any rate, you have one address from the man you followed. We have all the surveillance video, and I've been able to pull some decent photos out of them that we can show around. The New England League of Illusionists, an organization I invented, has claimed responsibility for what they call "An act of magical guerilla theatre." The newspapers are fulminating about the need for better mall security, which could only help us, and fortunately for us, an attractive young white woman has disappeared in the New York area, so the cable news networks are running with that story and essentially ignoring this one.

  "So. We could continue to watch the mall. We could also tail the person you know about, whose name is—"

  "William Castle."

  "Yes. Those are pretty much the options I see, unless you have something else."

  "Well," Laura produced her flash drive, "I copied the documents off that guy—William Castle's hard drive. And, uh . . . let's see. Oh yeah—Ted told me the guys who dug up Lovecraft's street had an Ocean State Power truck. So maybe one of them works there."

  "That's certainly worth investigating. Why don't you head over to the maintenance lot at Ocean State Power—here." Marrs reached below the table into a giant leather man-purse and pulled out a sheet of paper with a bunch of digital photos which he handed to Laura. "Here are the images we grabbed off the security videos, so you can ask after your guy. I'll take your flash drive and see if I can come up with anything interesting or worthwhile."

  They stood. "Uh, I have a question," Laura said.

  "Yes?"

  "Is there any—I mean, I know about the resources, but, you know, I drive a Corolla. I think I need a town car or something to look like I'm actually an agent. You know what I mean?"

  "I do. You can take my car—it's a large American rental, no idea what make or model. Here's the key," and he handed her a key on a rental car company chain.

  Laura headed for the Ocean State Power maintenance yard closest to College Hill, where they'd presumably dug up the Necronomicon.

  The lot was surrounded by eight-foot-tall chainlink and was full of idling trucks and panel vans and men in jeans and khaki work boots and blue Ocean State Power jackets drinking from large Styrofoam cups from Dunkin' Donuts.

  Laura walked across the lot to the office, stifling the urge to pull her badge and gun on the group that was loudly speculating about what her ass might look like in a nicer outfit. She realized she was still in her two-day-old surveillance clothes, and that a change of clothes might have been better for being taken seriously than a big American rental car. She turned her head and covertly sniffed her pit. Not great, but not horribly offensive.

  In the office, she talked to someone named Frank, who sat beneath an insurance agency calendar with a photo of a typical New England lighthouse above the month. He appeared to be in his forties, wore a blue jacket, jeans, and khaki work boots and drank from a Dunkin' Donuts cup.

  "We're just following up on the incident at the mall yesterday, trying to get some more witness statements, see if anybody saw anything that might be at all helpful, you know sometimes people think they don't have anything worth telling us about and it turns out that they've got that final piece of the puzzle. Anyway, another witness said she thought she remembered some people in OSP jackets. Any of these men look familiar to you?"

  "Sure. That's Dick there on the left. And Tracy is the other one. I don't recognize the rest."

  "Wonderful. And are either of these gentlemen in today?"

  "Well, they both clocked in, but they're not here. Let me just check—yeah, they're on the same crew. Leak near McCoy Stadium up in Pawtucket."

  "Okay—can you give me their home addresses, just in case we miss each other when I'm driving up there?"

  "Sure."

  Back in the car, she called Marrs. "I got two," she said.

  "Fantastic!" Marrs answered. He sounded genuinely thrilled, the first time he'd sounded anything but professorial.

  "Anything on the flash drive?"

  "A really shocking amount of foot fetish pornography—if you can call it p
ornography. I assume close-up photos of feet tied lovingly with silk cords count as pornography?"

  "I don't know, but you're making me hot just talking about it." There was a pause. "I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Anything else?

  "Yes. There's a file that suggests this group may possess a copy of the book that provides the key to the dangerous parts of the Necronomicon. I cross-referenced Mr. Castle's files with our copy of the Necronomicon, and though I personally lack the expertise to do the correlation, my resident cryptologist is very excited by what we've got thus far."

  "Glad to hear it. The supervisor at the power company told me these guys are out on a job, so I'm going to go see what I can find at their houses.

  "All right. But please try to avoid any kind of confrontation. Satisfying as it is to employ your hand-to-hand training, if two of these men are assaulted by you in their home, they will be clear that we're on to them."

  "Got it."

  A few moments later, Laura arrived at the closest address, which was the home of one Richard Johnson. "Dick Johnson," she thought to herself. "No wonder he turned evil." She felt a sudden pang as she imagined what kind of riff Ted would have done at finding the home of Dick Johnson.

  Dick Johnson lived in a small, beige ranch house in a middle-class neighborhood of Providence. A small yellow sign on his neatly trimmed lawn announced that he had an alarm system, and a small white sign on his lawn announced "A Pit Bull Lives Here!" Fantastic.

  She called Marrs. He asked her a series of questions about what she was seeing, and then told her which wire to cut to disarm the alarm. Of course, she had nothing to cut it with, so she asked him for directions to the nearest hardware store for wire cutters. Once she had the proper tools and had cut the alarm, she asked Marrs, "What about the dog?"

  "Well, I can direct you to a supermarket if you want to buy him a steak," Marrs said. "Otherwise, I'm afraid I can't be much help. While my expertise in subduing supernatural creatures is considerable, my mastery of the more mundane inhabitants of our planet is far more limited."

  "Don't you have any sleeping spells or anything I could use?"

  "You really don't want to attempt to perform any magic unless you are a hundred percent sure you know what you're doing." Laura had rolled her eyes and made the "blah blah" gesture with her left hand as Marrs had said that into her right ear.

  This left the dog as the only problem to be overcome. Laura couldn't shoot it without bringing Providence police around. She'd just have to hope that they were slower to respond to barking dog complaints than they were to gunshots.

  She approached the back door. She heard the dog barking and scratching at the door. She took a deep breath. She hoped that everything she'd learned about dealing with a human attacker would be applicable to a dog. She picked the back door lock quickly, then turned the door knob slowly, without actually opening the door. The dog was growling and barking uncontrollably, losing its mind in its desperation to get to her. Laura crouched five feet from the door and pushed it open with the rake.

  The dog reacted exactly as she'd hoped he would. As he sprang for her, barking and snarling, Laura caught him in the chest with her foot and used his momentum to flip him over her head. There was a whine of pain as the dog struck the sidewalk, but Laura was already running for the door. She had it closed and locked before the dog had managed to get up.

  She had no idea if any of the neighbors were home or if any of them had seen or heard anything. She decided she had to proceed quickly.

  Laura began to search the house, and the dog scratched at the back door, barking like mad.

  Seventeen

  Ted was tap dancing on Cthulhu's forehead. "Wake up, you dirty fucker! Wake the fuck up! You'll be late for school!"

  Cthulhu did not respond, did not stir. It had been this way through all of Ted's attempts to wake Cthulhu, which had been going on for at least two hours and at most several thousand years. When Ted had first caught sight of Cthulhu—supine, but large as a skyscraper, with a hideous ovoid head from which emanated hundreds of tentacles, each the thickness of a telephone pole, each covered in something viscous and green that occasionally dripped off and landed with a wet squelching sound—he'd screamed.

  When he'd finished screaming, he cried, and then he laughed, and this cycle repeated itself until Ted was thoroughly bored with himself. He was incapable of any new responses, he was just thinking and feeling the same things over and over, and he could feel his mind beginning to strain. Finally he decided he'd had enough. Ted was bored of playing word games trying to describe the passage of whatever passed here, was bored of trying to describe the geometry—once he'd come up with the perfect description, who would ever hear it? Who would ever appreciate how funny it was? Cayenne? Perhaps, but Ted had no way of knowing whether she'd actually made it through alive, whether she was even here. Certainly the first few hundred years he'd spent searching for her hadn't borne any fruit.

  Whatever this existence was, it seemed to be close enough to hell that Ted wanted out. So he'd kicked Cthulhu in the tentacle. And then he'd broken a stone off the roof of a nearby plaza and chucked it at Cthulhu's eye. It remained closed. "Wake up and kill me!" he implored the Old One. But, like many Old Ones, Cthulhu was apparently difficult to wake from his nap.

  Ted kicked, stomped, screamed, bludgeoned, did everything he could think of to awaken Cthulhu. But the quiet, wet breathing continued, a tentacle would sometimes twitch involuntarily, and Cthulhu slept on. At some point the quality of the sounds emanating from Cthulhu changed. Ted decided that he was snoring.

  He eventually grew bored of trying to wake Cthulhu and tried in vain to think of something else to do. He tried to stop himself thinking, because he could feel his thoughts spiraling downward into the abyss of depression he'd visited on his way here. Once he reached the bottom of the pit of despair, what would bring him out, since everything was apparently hopeless? No way, he couldn't allow himself to start thinking like that, or at all.

  In the past, when he'd wanted to stop himself from thinking, he'd tried drugs, none of which were available here; pornography, ditto; and, of course, television. Which of course did not exist here but which existed, blessedly, in his memory.

  "Okay," he said to Cthulhu, "now, the most recent thing I can remember watching was this reality show called Massachusetts Marriage. So I'll take all the parts—what's that?—no, you can't have the part of the slutty girl who makes out with everyone, that's the best part!"

  And Ted told the entire story of Massachusetts Marriage to Cthulhu, who was unmoved. From there, Ted began working backwards, assembling entire episodes of Law & Order, Seinfeld, anything he'd ever watched, which, he found, was an enormous storehouse of material. How many hours had he spent in front of TV Land, watching, for example, a Munsters marathon? How many days after school had he swallowed the delicious cocktail of The Brady Bunch/Gilligan's Island back-to-back episodes?

  "Ah, Sherwood Schwartz," he said aloud, "bard of the blended family, chronicler of the castaways, how do I revere thee on this day!" He then proceeded to tell Cthulhu about how Mom always said don't play ball in the house, and how Gilligan's last-minute blundering had turned the burning S.O.S. into a greeting for an astronaut named Sol.

  "And Laura used to give me that tut-tut thing about the TV—you know, 'you could at least read a book for God's sake, even those pathetic comic books you read are better than this crap!' But look at me now! Hanging with a celebrity and saving my sanity, such as it is, only because I wasted so much time! Ha!"

  Bringing up Laura's name brought a pang of sadness to Ted, and he fought not to think about how he'd never see her again, about how he might perhaps have leaned on her a little too hard over the last ten years, about how he didn't do enough to show her how much she meant to him. He could feel tears forming when he could swear he heard Cthulhu say something in a tiny, high voice.

  His head whipped around. "Whatchutalkinbout, Cthulhu?" he asked. There was silence for a moment, and th
en he heard it again. Somewhere, someone was saying, "Wake up!"

  Ted ran to the top of Cthulhu's head and looked down the other side, where he saw what had to be a hallucination. It was obviously a hallucination, because he was cursed, doomed to live a thousand thousand lifetimes of loneliness and despair, and that simply didn't square with the sight of Cayenne kicking Cthulhu in the tentacle. His heart leapt, and he began running down Cthulhu's slimy head, screaming, "Cayenne!" but, as before, his voice wasn't carrying, and Cayenne appeared to be lost in a reverie of rage and despair, so Ted actually got quite close before she could hear him.

  "Oh my God, it's you!" she called, and she immediately began to sob. He ran to her and put his arms around her and felt her body heave up and down and she gave great, gulping sobs. "I thought . . . I thought . . . Oh, my God I was going crazy, I was going so crazy, how many decades have I been here, how long have I been wishing . . . Oh my God, you can't be real, I must just be completely insane, and I don't care."

  Ted thought about insisting that he was real, but he just didn't feel all that sure of things after however many lifetimes in R'lyeh. Maybe, after all, he was Cayenne's hallucination, and it just took a while to find her. That would explain the absence of hunger or thirst or fatigue, though not how he'd known so much about television, or even Laura's name.

  He said none of this. He simply held Cayenne in his arms, thrilled at her presence, her aliveness, her separateness from him. They stayed like that, embracing and feeling the solidness of each other's presence, for what might have been a year. Then Ted pulled away and kissed her face, and then her mouth, and soon she broke away and said, "Let's find some place away from prying eyes and tentacles."

  They walked, hand-in-hand, for a while, and Ted didn't dare to let go of her hand for fear she'd disappear and he'd never find her again, or that one of them would simply stop existing without the other one there to perceive them. Finally they found an opening in a wall or floor and crawled into a pyramidal or possibly spherical space and were alone together.